Page 13 - FCW, May/June 2020

Using Creative Avenues to Modernize Agency Networks
Providing Government Agencies Access to Telecom Innovation
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agency mission requirements to find an acceptable solution. The tradeoff for moving from custom solutions designed for specific missions to commercial products is a reduction in customization and control in exchange for a decrease in time to implement the solutions and lower costs.
“That’s an interesting shift within the federal government agencies,” said Colin Gosnell, senior engineering leader at Comcast. “But it potentially closes off opportunities to the agencies and vendors alike to bring new innovation to federal agencies.”
Longstanding procurement rules such as the Federal Acquisitions Regulation (FAR), which agencies use in their acquisition of supplies and services with appropriated funds, and the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, which sets security requirements for working with the Defense Department, have become so cumbersome that agencies’ ability to procure services based
on innovation has become overly difficult to administer. It is easier and quicker to procure existing products and contract with vendors with a verified performance history than it is to incorporate new vendors or products into
an agency-specific acquisition strategy.
“There is no way to procure new products because there’s no vehicle by which to buy them
or because the product doesn’t focus on a government problem,” Gosnell said. The expense new vendors must invest to change
an off-the-shelf solution into one that meets federal- and agency- specific acquisition requirements is often viewed as excessive and discourages new, innovative products from being offered to the federal government.
FAR serves a legitimate purpose to protect the government against fraud and to prevent favoritism among vendors, for example,
but those requirements are not standard in the commercial world,
ederal government
departments are at varying stages in their efforts to modernize information technology. Because of the Modernizing Government Technology Act, the President’s Management Agenda and Cloud Smart, agencies have no shortage of guidance on what’s expected of them. What’s less clear, however, is how to acquire the foundational solution – secure high-speed, high-capacity networks – they need to make use of innovative but bandwidth- and data-intensive tools such as artificial intelligence, automation, big data, cloud computing, data mining, and edge computing.
Before agencies can modernize IT, they need to revamp their procurement processes. It used to be that government agencies drove innovation with solicited vendor solutions based on unique problems. Now, agencies are having to pivot to procuring commercially available products, attempting to adjust these existing vendor products and the
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